theatrealso spelled theaterin dramatic arts, an art concerned almost exclusively with live performances in which the action is precisely planned to create a coherent and significant sense of drama.

Though the word theatre is derived from the Greek theaomai, “to see,” the performance itself may appeal either to the ear or to the eye, as is suggested by the interchangeability of the terms spectator (which derives from words meaning “to view”) and audience (which derives from words meaning “to hear”). Sometimes the appeal is strongly intellectual, as in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the intellectual element in itself is no assurance of good theatre. A good performance of Hamlet, for example, is extremely difficult to achieve, and a poor one is much less rewarding than a brilliant presentation of a farce. Moreover, a good Hamlet makes demands on the spectator that may be greater than he what that spectator is prepared to put forward, while the farce may be enjoyed in a condition of comparative relaxation. The full participation of the spectator is a vital element in theatre.

There is a widespread misconception that the art of theatre can be discussed solely in terms of the intellectual content of the script. Theatre is not essentially a literary art, though it has been so taught in some universities and schools. For many years the works of the Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, and other significant writers such as Friedrich von Schiller were more likely to be studied than performed in their entirety. The literary side of a theatrical production works most effectively when it is subordinated to the histrionic. The strongest impact on the audience is made by acting, singing, and dancing, followed by spectacle—the background against which those activities take place. Later, on reflection, the spectator may find that the meaning of the text has made the more enduring impression, but more often the literary merit of the script, or its “message,” is a comparatively minor element.

Yet it is often assumed that the theatrical experience can be assimilated by reading the text of a play. In part, this is a result of the influence of theatrical critics, who, as writers, tend to have a literary orientation. Their influence is magnified by the fact that it is difficult to make serious theatre cannot be made widely available; for each person who sees an important production in a theatre, thousands of others will know it only through the notices of critics. While reviewers in the popular papers mainstream press may give greater credence to such elements as acting and dancing, critics in the more serious journals may be more interested in textual and thematic values. Such influences vary from country to country, of course. In New York City a critic for one newspaper, such as The New York Times, may determine the fate and historical record of a production, assuring it a successful run or forcing it to close overnight. In London, however, audiences have notoriously resisted the will of the critics, and in some cities, such as Moscow, reviews may take many weeks to appear.

This is not to say that the contribution of the author to the theatrical experience is unimportant. The script of a play is the basic element of theatrical performance. In the case of many masterpieces it is the most important element. But even these dramatic masterpieces demand the creative cooperation of artists other than the author. The dramatic script, like an operatic score or the scenario of a ballet, is no more than the raw material from which the performance is created. The actors, rather than merely reflecting a creation that has already been fully expressed in the script, give body, voice, and imagination to what was only a shadowy indication in the text. The text of a play is as vague and incomplete in relation to a fully realized performance as is a musical score to a concert. The Hamlets of two great actors probably differ more than two virtuoso renditions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations possibly can. In general, the truly memorable theatrical experience is one in which the various elements of performance are brought into a purposeful harmony. It is a performance in which the text has revealed its meanings and intentions through skillful acting in an environment designed with the appropriate measure of beauty or visual dramaimpact.

This article contains a treatment of the art of theatre in the most general terms, an attempt to illuminate what it is and why it has been regarded as a fundamental human activity throughout history. An extensive treatment of the elements of theatre can be found in theatrical production. For the relationship of theatre to music and dance, seetheatre music, opera, and dance. For historical treatment of Western theatre, seeWestern theatre, history of. The theatrical traditions of other cultures of the world are considered at length in articles such as African theatre; , East Asian arts: Dance and theatre; , Islamic arts: Dance and theatre; , South Asian arts: Dance , and theatre; and Southeast Asian arts: The performing arts. For a general survey of dramatic literature and its tragic and comic forms, seedramatic literature. Dramatic literature is also treated in articles on the literatures of particular languages, nations, or regions—e.g., African literature, Belgian literature, English literature, French literature, German literature, Russian literature, Scandinavian literature, and so on.

General considerations

Exactly how the theatre came into being is not known. While it is indisputable that the traditions born in ancient Athens have dominated Western theatre and the theories of Western drama up to the present, it is impossible to state with certainty what the theatre was like even a few years before the appearance of Aeschylus’ Aeschylus’s earliest extant play, Persians (472 BCBCE). Legend attributes the invention of the dithyramb, the lyrical ancestor of tragedy, to the poet Arion of Lesbos in the 7th or 6th century BCBCE, but it was not until the creation of the Great (or City) Dionysia in Athens in 534 that tragic drama established itself. The Dionysiac festivals were held in honour of Dionysus, a god concerned with fertility, wine, and prophecy. Dionysiac celebrations, held in the spring, were traditionally occasions for frenzy, sexual license, and ecstatic behaviour welcoming the return of fertility to the land after the winter (reflected dramatically in the Bacchants by Euripides). The Great Dionysia was a more formal affair, with its competition in tragedy, but its religious purpose is often cited as a pointer to the origin of drama itself.

In the theories that see drama as a development from primitive religious rites, the dramatist is often described as a descendant of the priest. Theatrical representation could have arisen first from the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice, say, a goat for a virgin or a young warrior. In time, the formula of the sacrifice might have been enacted ritualistically without the actual sacrifice of the animal. (The word tragedyis descended from the Greek tragōidia, meaning “song of the goats.”)

Considered in such a way, the most famous of Greek tragedies, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, can be seen as a formalistic representation of human sacrifice. Oedipus becomes a dramatic embodiment of guilt; his blinding and agony are necessary for the good of all Thebes, because it was by killing his father and marrying his mother that he first brought the gods’ curse upon his people. Aristotle felt that the representation on stage of Oedipus’ Oedipus’s suffering was a means of vicarious catharsis—vicarious purgation , or cleansing, for cleansing—for the spectators.

Other explanations, however, However, other explanations for the origin of drama have been offered. Mimesis, the artistic representation or imitation of an event, has been discerned in such primitive rituals as war dances, which are intended to frighten the enemy and instill courage into the hearts of the participants. These dances may imitate the action of battle itself, or at least the way in which the participants hope to see the battle develop.

The origins of drama have also been attributed to simple storytelling, as when the storyteller adopts a false voice or adds characterization through movement and costume. In such terms, the art of theatre could be described at its most fundamental as the presence of an actor before an audience.

Whatever the primary motivation, the first systematic elaboration of theatre can be seen through the work of the Greek playwrights of 5th-century-BCBCEAthens. Aeschylus apparently inherited a form that consisted of a single actor responding to or leading a chorus. His innovation is generally considered to have been the use of a second actor, and it was either Aeschylus or Sophocles who added a third actor as they competed each year for prizes in the Great Dionysia. Once a third actor had appeared, the chorus gradually declined, and it was the multiplying individual characters who assumed importance. In this way, classical ancient Greece left to posterity a measure of specialization among theatrical performers.

Beyond these formal elements, however, classical Classical drama offers a pattern of development that has been reenacted continually in other cultures throughout history. The rapid rise and decline of drama in ancient Athens paralleled the rise and decline of the Athenian civilization itself. Great periods of achievement in theatre have tended to coincide with periods of national expansion and achievement, when man’s breadth of vision expands to encompass the cosmos, as in Elizabethan England. Conversely, periods of excessive materialism, such as those of the decay of during which ancient Greece or ancient Rome declined, tend to produce theatre in which ostentation, spectacle, and vulgarity predominate.

Probably more than in other arts, each theatrical style represents an amalgamation of diverse heritages. Although the Greek theatre has long had the most direct influence on Western culture, many later innovations have been borrowed from previously remote cultures such as India, Bali, and Japan. but in the late 20th century Balinese and Japanese arts were frequently adapted in the West. Chinese and Indian theatrical practices have had wide influence in Asia. A fundamental difference between borrowings from Greek theatre and borrowings of a more recent and exotic nature from Asian traditions is that the techniques of Greek performance have not been handed down with the texts. Most of what is known about the actual performance of Greek plays is the result of scholarly and archaeological research. Information about the nature of the music and of choral dances, for example, is very skimpy.

In the Oriental Asian theatre, on the other hand, techniques as well as texts have survived. For example, the nōNoh theatre of Japan has been handed down through families of performers with little change for 600 few changes for hundreds of years. In addition to the instructions for performers contained in India’s NāṭyaNatya-śāstrashastra, there is a major descriptive treatise on music, giving guidance on musical techniques. The NāṭyaNatya-śāstrashastra, which may be as old as Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century BCBCE), is a book with very specific injunctions to performers, including dancers. Some of its techniques may be found in surviving theatre forms such as the Indian kathakalidancein Kerala, India. In turn, some of these techniques have been assimilated were assimilated during the second half of the 20th century by such Western directors as Jerzy Grotowskiand , Peter Brook. With other , and Eugenio Barba. Other writers and directors created new relationships between Eastern and Western theatre by consciously exploiting techniques and traditions from such forms as Kabuki and nō, new relationships are inevitableNoh.

There is little doubt that the Greek theatre, with its literary emphasis, has theatre—and especially the study of its literature—has provided Western theatre with a sense of continuity in stories, themes, and formal styles. The plays themselves are regularly revived, with discernible references to specifically modern concerns. It is also notable that the Greek theatre has served as a model for such a wide range of great writersas , from Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille in 17th-century France and to Eugene O’Neill in the United States during the 20th century. When Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) touched its audiences with awe and pity in the manner of Aristotle’s prescriptions, critics debated whether the play could be genuinely tragic in the Greek sense, given that it had no nobler a protagonist than the salesman Willy Loman.

Implicit in all developments since Athenian drama reached its peak in the 5th century BC has been the measure of the greatness of the Greeks. That the heights which they achieved have never been equaled stands as a powerful argument against an easy belief in the constant progress of mankind.

Theatre as expression

Mimesis in theatre

The art of the theatre is essentially one of make-believe, or mimesis. In this respect it differs from music, which seldom attempts to imitate “real” sounds—except in so-called program music, such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which suggests the sounds of a battle. In this respect , the art of narrative in literature is much closer to that of the theatre. In a story, considerable attention must be paid to plausibility. Even if the story is not intended to be believed as having actually happened, plausibility is essential if the story is to hold the auditor’s attention. The principal factor in plausibility is not precise correspondence with known facts but inner consistency in the story itself.

Drama also requires plausibility, but in drama it must be conveyed not by a narrator but by the actors’ ability to make the audience “believe in” their speech, movement, thoughts, and feelings. This plausibility is based on the connection between the impression made by the actors and the preconceptions of the auditors. If the character Hamlet is to be plausible, the actor must make his an audience believe that Hamlet could conceivably be as he is presented. This does not mean that the actor must make his the audience believe that he (or she) literally is Hamlet, merely that he is plausibly and consistently making-believe to be Hamlet. The aim of a performance is not to persuade spectators that a palpable fiction is fact, that they are “really” there, out on those bitterly cold battlements of Hamlet’s castle at Elsinore. Indeed, they are far freer to appreciate the play and to think about it if they are not “really” present. Knowing all the time that it is a figment, they are willing to enter into the make-believe, to be transported, if it is sufficiently convincing. Yet they know that, however thrilling or pleasurable the rapture, it may be shattered at any moment by some ineptitude or mistake on the stage or by a coughing neighbour in the audience.

That is the basic rule, or convention, of the make-believe of the theatre. The actor breaks the basic rule of the game if he forgets his words, or laughs at private jokes, or is simply incompetent, or is unsuited to his part. No modern audience can accept a vulgar, lumpish, elderly Hamlet, because Hamlet is a young prince whose lines are consistently thoughtful and witty. Yet it is not necessary that the actor playing Hamlet should “really” be all these things; he need only give the impression of being princely, witty, elegant, and young enough to sustain the credulity of the people sharing the make-believe. That credulity can extend a considerable way; the actress Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet several times in her old agethe actress Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet.

Thus, in every performance there must be realism in some degree. At certain epochs and in certain kinds of plays, the aim has been to be as realistic as possible. But even the most realistic production (e.g., Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchardin Konstantin Stanislavsky’s production at Moscowas first produced by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904) made immense concessions to theatrical artifice. Conversation in real life often leads nowhere; it is full of inconclusive, meaningless, boring passages. It does not necessarily attempt, as every word in Chekhov’s play must, to fit into a story, to be part of the expression of a theme, or to introduce and reveal a group of characters.

Though most commercial, light comedies continue to be written and acted as realisticallyas possible, realistic theatre fell out of fashion in the first half of the 20th century in response to a host of avant-garde theatrical experiments and the advent of motion pictures. Just as realistic painting declined when photographs began to achieve similar effects mechanically, so did staging that attempted to reproduce the actual world in every detail decline lose artistic status when such effects became commonplace in films.

Even before the introduction of motion pictures, the theatre was moving toward extravagantly nonrealistic theatrical effects, from the puppet-inspired theatre of Alfred Jarry, author of Ubu roi (1896; “King Ubu”), to the Symbolist dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, Edward Gordon Craig’s the concept of the Übermarionette (“Superior Puppet”) developed by Edward Gordon Craig, and theatrical surrealismSurrealism. The most unrealistic productions, however, inevitably retained certain quite realistic features; the actors still had to be recognizably human, no matter how fantastic the script and settings might be.

Theatre as social expression

In different contexts, different various aspects of humanity have seemed important and have therefore been stressed in Western theatrical representation. Much Renaissance drama, for instance, emphasized the individuality of each character, while in later 17th-century theatre, which was much more restricted in its philosophy and in its setting, man a character was presented not as a creature proclaiming his unique importance who occupied a unique place and status in the universe but rather as one someone adapted to and determined by the quite limited environment of 17th-century society. The greatness of the Elizabethan theatre was the universality of its outlook and the breadth of its appeal; these have never been regained. Since the latter part of the 17th century, the art of the theatre has been concerned with smaller themes and has aimed at a smaller section of society.

From the 17th to through the 19th 18th century, the theatre’s leading characters were almost exclusively persons of breeding and position; the “lower classes” appeared as servants and dependents, mostly presented in low comedy. Rustics were almost automatically ridiculous, although sometimes their simplicity might be endearing or pathetic. The 17th-century plays of Molière are a good deal more egalitarian than English plays of similar date , or even of a century later; but even Molière never allowed the audience to forget that his plays were about, and for, persons of high station. A very clear line is drawn between employers and employed in these plays, and the latter, though often more intelligent, never seem to belong to quite even the same species as the former. By the middle of the However, such English plays as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and George Lillo’s The London Merchant; or, The History of George Barnwell (1731) were influential and theatrical successes that stood out against the norm.

By the early 19th century, European theatre had become at least as much a middle-class as an aristocratic entertainment. Nevertheless, it was still thought important, especially in London, that the actors suggest gentility. George Bernard Shaw, in Our Theatres in the Nineties (1932), remarked that, to be employed in a good production, it was far less important that a young actor be talented than that he speak “well” and be beautifully dressed. The plays that succeeded throughout Europe were plays about men and women of good social position, and the plots were concerned with some infringement, usually sexual, of the genteel code of behaviour; The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) by Arthur Wing Pinero is an example. The melodrama that dominated 19th-century European (and especially British) theatre championed the values of the middle class. However, the new literary drama of Henrik Ibsen that emerged during the second half of the century challenged those values.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet theatre broke with gentility. The heroes and heroines of Soviet theatre were splendid, muscular, idealistic workers. In western Europe, however, gentility continued in the 1920s and ’30s to be the dominant aim of the fashionable theatre. In New York City it received a setback at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s. At a famous series of productions at the New York Group Theatre, the director Harold Clurman was in conscious revolt against the oppressive bourgeois gentility of the day. The theatre Group Theatre was not spectacularly successful, however, and it stayed in existence for no more than a few years.

In Europe it was not until after World War IIthat , the theatre made more-concerted efforts to reflect and to interest a wider section of society. By that time, however, audiences at all levels had lost the habit of theatregoing and were fast losing the habit of moviegoing, as television was becoming the popular medium of drama—indeed, of all entertainment. Theatre began to be directed not to any one class in society or to any one income group but rather toward to anyone who was prepared for the energetic collaboration in the creative act that the art demands. By the end of the 20th century, the emergence of digital technologies that enabled the use of high-quality recorded video and sound in theatres had sparked a debate over the “liveness” of theatre and whether the nature of theatre itself had become fundamentally altered by these technologies.

Elements of theatre

The theatrical hierarchy

Theatrical art demands the collaboration of the actors with one another, with a director, with the various technical workers upon whom they depend for costumes, scenery, and lighting, and with the business people businesspeople who finance, organize, advertise, and sell the product.

Collaboration among so many types of personnel presupposes a hierarchysystem that divides duties. In the commercial theatre the most powerful person is usually the producer(until recently known as the manager in the British theatre, which has now adopted the American usage). He , who is responsible for acquiring the investment that finances the production. The rehearsal of the play is conducted by the director(formerly known in Britain as the producer), who is responsible for interpreting the script, for casting, and for helping to determine the design of the scenery and costumes. Under his the director’s general direction, a stage manager, possibly with several assistants, looks after the organization of rehearsal and the technical side elements of the performance—light and curtain cues, properties, sound effects, and so on.

Naturally, the hierarchy varies somewhat in different circumstances. In the state-subsidized Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, for example, the apex of the pyramid is has traditionally been occupied by an artistic director, who is more concerned with guiding the policy of the theatre than with details of administration or the preparation of any single production—though he the artistic director may, of course, also assume responsibility for the preparation of a number of productions. The dominant expression so In regional theatres, implementation of artistic policy may be subordinate to a board of directors that is ultimately responsible for overseeing costs.

The dominant expression—so far as the audience can tell is tell—is nearly always that of the actorwith the most important part. It may , therefore , be wondered why theatres are no longer dominated by the actor-managersmanager system, as they were in during the 19th -century century in Europe and the United States. In London, where for example, Sir Henry Irving managed the Lyceum for 21 years (1878–99) as its artistic director, administrator, producer-director, and leading actor. Since After Irving’s day, theatrical business has become became infinitely more costly and complicated. Budgets in Irving’s time were only a fraction of what they became a century laterare today. A single Broadway musical can now cost in excess many millions of $5dollars, 000,000, while the running costs of organizations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company rise to many are tens of millions of pounds each year. In addition, there are complicated negotiations with trade unions make oversight of a theatre significantly more complicated.

Although the leading actor seems completely to dominate the a performance completely, he that actor is often only a mouthpiece: the words he speaks spoken so splendidly were written by somebody someone else; the tailor and wigmaker must take some credit for his the actor’s appearance; and that he the actor should play the part at all was usually not his own the idea but that of a producer or director.

Even before the actors assemble for the first rehearsal, the producer, director, designer, and—if he is available—the author have conferred on many important decisions, such as the casting and the design of scenery and clothes. In the commercial theatre, the capacity of the theatre that is selected determines the and the anticipated number of the show’s performances determine the budget and therefore the scale of the production. (Different considerations affect the planning of programs in the subsidized theatre, including responsibility to new writing, to the national heritage, and to a balanced repertoire.) Certainly the most lively part of the work still lies in the period of rehearsal, but much of it the artistic imprint has been determined before it begins.

Although it might be supposed that the author would be the best person to direct a play, he usually is not, for several reasons. First, authors are apt to love their brainchildren not wisely but too well; and, like most parents, they are not usually the most impartial judges of their plays’ character and quality. Also, authors rarely combine a knowledge of their own craft with a good working knowledge of the quite different craft of direction.

rehearsals.

The role of the audience

It is partly because it is a collaborative art, involving so much compromise, that the theatre seems often to lag behind other arts, expressing dated views in a dated manner. There is another reason too: the theatre The theatre depends more than most arts upon audience response. If the house is not full, not only does the performance lose money , but it also loses force. It is unusual for unusual—but not impossible—for new ideas, even for new ways of expressing old ideas, to be popularachieve wide commercial success. With few exceptions, people apparently do not go to the theatre to receive new ideas; they want the thrilling, amusing, or moving expression of old ones.

If a performance is going well, the members of its audience tend to subordinate engage in collective behaviour that subordinates their separate identities to that of the crowd. This phenomenon can be observed not only at the theatre but also at concerts, bullfights, and prizefights. The crowd personality is never as intelligent rational as the sum of its members’ intelligence, and it is much more emotional. Intelligent members Members of an audience lose , to an extraordinary degree, their powers of independent , rational thought; instead, unexpected reserves of passion come into play. Laughter becomes infectious; grave and solid citizens, as members of an audience, can be rendered helpless with mirth by jests that would leave them unmoved if they were alone.Theatre audiences are, moreover, virtually incapable of an intellectual consideration of the ideas presented to them unless those ideas are already familiar. Familiar ideas can be received effortlessly while the emotional or thrilling or amusing aspects of the presentation are enjoyed. Thus the effectiveness of a theatrical performance never depends solely upon the excellence of a text. Laurence Olivier’s performance as Shakespeare’s Richard III was more exciting than his

performances in many superior works of Shakespeare. Theatrical art succeeds to the degree that excitement is engendered in the audience, a factor unrelated to the intellectual merits of the textWhile an audience may typically be a passive participant in a modern theatrical performance, this norm is neither universal nor transhistorical. Until the late 19th century, when auditoriums were first darkened, audiences were highly responsive, demonstrating disapproval as boisterously as approval. This type of involvement is still evident in British pantomime, which is produced annually during the Christmas season. During the 20th century, audience passivity was challenged through the theories of drama associated with Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal and through the breaking of various social codes, as occurred in the Théâtre Action in France or the Théâtre Parminou in Quebec. Such interactive relations with the fictional stage world—either bringing audience members onstage to interrupt and redirect action or involving the public unwittingly as witness to a theatre event—are typically engineered to challenge individuals’ political beliefs as well as a society’s norms.

The effect of theatre structure

From the 17th to the early 20th century, few dreamed of building a theatre in other than the now traditional proscenium style. This style consists of a horseshoe shape or rounded auditorium in several tiers facing the stage, from which it is divided by an arch—the proscenium—which supports the curtain. Behind the curtain the backstage machinery facilitates quick changes of illusionistic scenery. This type of theatre was developed for Italian opera in the 17th century. From the proscenium theatre’s introduction, productions of plays of all themes have tended to exploit the audience’s pleasure in its dollhouse realism.

The Whereas today’s proscenium theatre separates the audience from the performers. In , the theatres of Elizabethan England and 16th- and 17th-century Spain were open stages (also called thrust stages), structured so that the actors performed in the very midst of their audience. Their theatre English theatres had evolved from the courtyards of inns, in which while Spanish theatres took corrales (courtyards enclosed by the backs of several houses) as their model; in both a raised platform was erected for a stage. Some members of the audience stood around it while others watched from windows and galleries surrounding the inn yardcourtyard.

In the early years of the 20th century, the English actor-manager William Poel suggested that Shakespeare should be staged so as to relate the performers and the audience as they had been on the Elizabethan stage. His ideas slowly gained in influence, and in 1953 just such an “open” a stage, with no curtain and with the audience sitting on three sides of it, was built for the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Ontario, Can. A considerable success, it had a strong influence on subsequent theatre design. The Globe Theatre was rebuilt in London in the 1990s along even more rigorous reconstructive principles.

The open stage proved suitable not only for Elizabethan plays but also for a wide repertoire. Probably it It will probably never completely replace the proscenium, which remains more suitable for the countless plays that were written with such a stage in mind, such as the comedies of Molière or the including the highly artificial comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oscar Wilde. On the other hand, the more realistic plays of Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov, all written for the proscenium theatre, lend themselves well to the open stage.

There are three solid a number of reasons for preferring the open stage. First, more people can be accommodated in a given cubic space if arranged around the stage instead of just in front of it. This is important not merely for the economic advantage of a larger capacity but also for artistic reasons—the closely packed audience generates more concentration and excitementa greater sense of unity.

A second reason for preferring the open stage is that the actors are nearer to more of their audience and can therefore be better heard and seen. This point is contested by adherents of the proscenium stage, who claim that the actor at any given moment must have his back turned to a large part of the house and, as a result, must be more difficult to see and hear. If the open stage is used efficiently, however, the actor’s back will never be turned to anyone for more than a few seconds at a time.

The third reason is that members of an audience seated all around the stage are far more aware of the presence of the others than is the case in an opera house. The performance thereby is appreciated more as an event jointly shared and created by the audience and the actors.

Since Likewise, an open stage allows actors to be more aware of their audience.

After the arguments for the open stage were first made , theatres such and gained popularity after the middle of the 20th century, many theatres—such as the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., have been —were designed “in the round” so that the audience completely surrounds surrounded the stage. Other theatres have followed the example of Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre by taking as the starting point an “empty room,” in which a different environment may be constructed for each production, radically altering the relationship between actors and audience for each play. The proliferation of “black box” spaces from the 1960s onward demonstrates the popularity of this configuration, in which a neutral space—a theatrical tabula rasa—can be, through spatial reconfiguration and minimal scenic detail, redesignated again and again in infinite variety.

The proscenium has come to be associated so closely with creating “illusion” that, its critics argue, it has led to a misconception about the function of drama and to a misdirection of the energies of dramatists, players, and audiences. The singleminded A single-minded attempt by the actors to create, or by the audience to undergo, illusion reduces drama to a form of deception. By the end of the 20th century, proscenium theatre had become a term used to denigrate an art form dominated by bourgeois aesthetics and dismissed as not innovative.

The art of the theatre is concerned with something more significant than creating the illusion that a series of quite obviously contrived events are “really” happening. King Lear is far more complex and interesting than that. Art is concerned not with deception but with enlightenment. The painter’s art helps its audience to see and the musician’s art helps it to hear in a more enlightened way: Rembrandt and Bach are trying not to deceive their audiences but to express and to share their deepest thoughts and feelings. Similarly, the art of the theatre is concerned with expressing the most profound thoughts and feelings of the performers about the story they are enacting, so that the audience may partake in the ritual event. The actual configuration of the stage and audience spaces may be less important in this respect than the performances themselves.

The influence of writing and scholarship

Like the other arts, the theatre has been the subject of a great deal of theoretical and philosophical writing, as well as criticism, both of a journalistic and of a less ephemeral character. Members of the theatrical profession have probably been influenced by the work of scholars and theorists more than they realize. Scholarship has made Shakespeare’s work, for example, far more intelligible and coherent. On the other hand, many of the scholarly debates over small points seem irrelevant in the theatre.

A commendable example of scholarship is the emendation of Mrs. by the 18th-century editor Lewis Theobald of Mistress Quickly’s description of Falstaff’s death in Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act II, Scene 3) , from “a table of green fields,” which, in the context, seems unintelligible, to “a [i.e., he] babbled of green fields,” which is not only comprehensible but touching. But it scarcely alters the way in which an actress actor will speak this phrase. It is one descriptive phrase among five or six others relating his Falstaff’s fumbling with the sheets, playing with flowers, and smiling at his fingers’ ends. It may be among the greatest description descriptions of the moment of death in all Western literature; in the course of performance, however, an audience does not follow even so great a passage as this word by word. A Likewise, a compelling actor playing Hamlet can ask whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the “eggs and bacon” of outrageous fortune, and few will be aware that he has not said “slings and arrows.” And, if Mrs. Mistress Quickly says “a table of green fields” with good accent and discretion, the musical flow and emotional effect of this marvelous speech will hardly be diminished.

Until recently, scholars and From the late 19th century, theatre attracted considerable attention from scholars. The German tradition of Theaterwissenschaft (“theatre science”), following the work of Max Herrmann, was particularly influential during the last decades of the 19th century in defining theatre studies as distinct from literature. Brander Matthews pioneered the teaching of playwriting in universities in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, and, as a result, today all the theatre arts garner respect as academic disciplines. Beginning in the 1940s, Alois M. Nagler trained generations of students at Yale University to value original documents and historical data in the study of theatre, an approach that considerably expanded knowledge of performance style and production circumstances across historical periods and around the world.

From the 1980s onward, theatre scholarship—like almost all scholarship across the humanities—showed the influence of deconstruction, postmodernism, and interculturalism (an analytic approach that emphasizes the relationships between cultures). Cross-cultural approaches by both scholars and theatre artists also reflected the tremendous influence of anthropology on the field. The result was that, by the turn of the 21st century, theatre was no longer studied as an art form isolated from other social practices; instead, performance was regarded as something that exists along a continuum that includes theatrical performance—what is conventionally “on the stage”—as well as everyday life, religious devotion, a multitude of rituals, and many forms of spectacle presented by (and by way of) the mass media and other elements of a culture’s media network. Scholarship of the mid-20th century often emphasized the work of “great” artists in various disciplines (playwriting, acting, directing, design, and so forth); in the first decade of the 21st century, scholars tended to disregard the biographies of these individuals and instead to emphasize aesthetic achievements in theatre as culturally relevant statements with meaning that is determined not just by the artists but also by those who watch and listen. Theatre came to be studied not primarily as an elite form but as one pursued in and by communities of all kinds. Within this environment, performance studies emerged as a discipline alongside theatre studies and pushed many scholars toward a more inclusive approach (aesthetically, socially, and transculturally).

Yet until the late 20th century, scholars and professionals in the English-language theatre lived almost completely segregated from one another. The tradition is was rather different in continental Europe, where for many years centuries the dramaturge has been was a vital part of the state theatre companies. A dramaturge is usually a writer, critic, or scholar who advises the a theatre on literary points, as well as editing classic texts and perhaps translating foreign plays. With the establishment of the National Theatre of Great Britain in 1962, the idea of a dramaturge was transplanted to Britain, the critic Kenneth Tynan becoming part of the theatre management in 1963. Other British theatres, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, have fruitfully married scholarship, in the form of a dramaturge, to their planning of productions.

Much journalistic criticism is marred by a reviewer or critic who wants to be just without being dull. Justice demands reason and moderation, but such qualities are often less interesting to read than high-coloured opinion. Shaw was perhaps the greatest theatrical and musical critic in English, but he again and again strayed, in the pursuit of readership, into exaggeration, prejudiced partisanship, and facile jokes at the expense of actors, as in his Our Theatres in the Nineties.

The place of theatre in contemporary life

Work, leisure, and theatre

In general, human beings have regarded as serious the activities that aid in survival and propagate the species. At all levels of sophistication, however, serious human pursuits offer opportunities for entertainment. Perhaps members of the human species have never made a clear-cut distinction between work and play. The best workers enjoy their workAll kinds of work may be enjoyed under the proper circumstances, be it surgery, carpentry, housework, or fieldwork. They The best workers engage themselves in work that permits, even demands, an expression of their invention and ingenuity. Indeed, the most valuable workers are often not the most strenuous but rather the most ingenious and resourceful; , and as their tasks increase in complexity and responsibility, the need for intelligence and imagination increases. These qualities are also expressed in the play of such people.

In the times and places in which theatre has become frivolous or vulgar or merely dull, the more educated theatregoers have tended to stay away from it. This was the case in London during the first half of the 19th century. A similar movement away from the theatre by the intelligentsia occurred in New York City in the middle of the 20th century, as fewer and fewer serious dramatic productions were undertaken. While Broadway became devoted primarily devoted to musicals or star vehicles, interest in serious theatre developed in the smaller and more specialized Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres and in regional theatres.

Of the many theories and philosophies propounded about the purposes of theatrical art, from the Poetics of Aristotle onward, most presuppose that the theatre is directed toward an elite consisting of the wealthier, more-leisured, and better-educated members of a community. In these theories, popular theatre is assumed to be noisily cheerful and egregiously sentimental, with easy tunes, obvious jokes, and plenty of knockabout “business.” In the 20th century, however, the distinctions between social classes in the West became progressively more blurred. Egalitarian manners became fashionable, indeed obligatory, and the theories that gave serious art a role exclusively for the upper classes lost much of their force. Likewise, elite interest in “folk” forms generated new audiences for such forms and helped save traditions around the world that might otherwise have succumbed to industrialization and cultural globalization.

Paradoxically, while more people in the industrialized nations are enjoying more leisure than ever before, there has not been a proportional increase in theatrical attendance. Those engaged in the white-collar professions or employed in a managerial capacity, unlike the aristocrats of earlier times, generally allow themselves little leisure time. Of those engaged in industry, whose leisure time has increased, a significant proportion do not choose to attend the theatre regularly. Moreover, the theatre’s efforts to appeal to the whole community generally have been futile. There exists an ever-widening gulf: on one side, a small, enthusiastic, and highly vocal minority clamours for art galleries, symphony concerts, and drama; on the other side, the vast majority is apathetic with regard to these cultural pastimes and institutions. The

role of subsidy

A apathy—or even hostility—felt by the majority was evident in the 1980s and ’90s in controversies over state support for the arts, centred especially on the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States and the Arts Council of Great Britain.

The role of subsidy

In most countries at the turn of the 21st century, a serious theatre, with or without massive public attendance, must had to be sustained by other financial support that went beyond box-office revenue. Public funds have been used were—and continue to be—used for this purpose throughout Europe and in much of Asia and Africa. The assumption behind such a subsidy is the realistic one that a serious theatre is now simply too costly to pay its way. Usually, national theatres in urban settings are the recipients of support.

In Great Britain in 1940, under the threat of imminent invasion in World War II, the national government took the first steps toward subsidizing theatre by guaranteeing a tour of the Old Vic Theatre theatre company against loss. Subsequently, with the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946, its support of theatre increased continually. By the last quarter of the 20th century 1970s many millions of pounds were committed each year to supporting a network of regional theatres, small touring groups, so-called fringe theatres, and the “centres of excellence,” meaning the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the English National Opera, and opera the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. Subsidy in Britain was the means by which the British theatre industry became the strongest in the world, both as a significant export and as a chief tourist attraction. Under successive Conservative governments, however, such subsidy was slashed, and by the 1990s funds derived from a national lottery were substituted for direct government support.

Until the middle of the 20th century, private patronage was and box-office revenue were still the sole support supports of legitimate theatre in the United States, but eventually charitable support was encouraged by a structure of tax allowances and by philanthropic organizations such as the Ford Foundation. With few exceptions, however, professional theatre in the United States remained strictly a commercial business. Nonprofit regional theatres gradually created an alternative to Broadway, but while the regional theatres have established faithful and discerning audiences, the record of the commercial theatre has been blotted by numerous instances of greed and irresponsibility and an absence of a longer view than immediate personal advantage. Unions have sometimes pressed demands that have made professional theatrical production economically difficult.

Academic theatre

A significant factor for some years has been the theatrical activity conducted by the In the West in the late 20th century, only in Germany did there exist a truly generous level of federal and civic support for the arts.

At the turn of the 21st century, private money compensated for decreasing public subsidy in both the United States and Great Britain. Corporate sponsorship became increasingly important in underwriting theatre companies as well as specific shows. Such a means of funding tended to be more conducive to large-budget theatre and well-established companies (particularly opera, ballet, and regional theatres) with strong ties to local philanthropic and corporate communities. Start-up or smaller companies were less likely to be sustained by corporate sponsorship; such funding was also often considered anathema by companies committed to political critique.

Academic theatre

From the second half of the 20th century onward, there was a significant amount of theatrical activity conducted by American and European universities with departments of drama. Their theatres, often sometimes handsomer and better equipped than professional houses, present presented plays of all sorts . Millions to communities often beyond the reach of regional or touring companies. Today millions of people attend performances in university theatres each year, and, in serious planning and choice of programs, the academic theatre’s standards are far superior to frequently rival professional theatre, since the aim is educational. UnfortunatelyHowever, many leading parts, whether in classics or in potboilers, call for assured and authoritative actors between 35 and 50 years of age. Academic theatre, therefore, is handicapped at the outset by the immaturity lack of experience of most of its student-actors, though professional actors are sometimes hired for special productions or to become actors-in-residence.

A more serious drawback is that the direction of drama departments and of university theatres is often entrusted to academicstheatrical professionals who, chosen in most instances for scholarly rather than theatrical distinctionin order to fulfill teaching obligations, often cannot devote much time and energy to the theatre. Furthermore, most college theatres operate on extremely low budgets, and, while money without taste and intelligence cannot create good theatre, taste and intelligence without money can seldom do so either. The highest standards can , in certain instances , be achieved by sheer ingenuity, but, in general, shoestring budgets result in that desperate air of “making do”—almost a trademark of academic theatre.

It is a common error in colleges and universities to suppose that the mere production of a masterpiece must amount to an educational experience for players and audience alike. It is not so. Incompetent acting and direction can reduce the greatest masterpiece to suffocating, excruciating tedium. Moreover, in many schools the theatre must be economically self-supporting, and each season one of the successful Broadway musicals of yesteryear is put on to redeem the losses incurred by Shakespeare, Molière, and O’Neill.In Britain the universities still, with few exceptions, have been slow to find a place for theatrical art in the curriculum. They frequently continue to take the view that, if university students want to act, they must join a club and act in their spare time. But in the 1960s British universities began to come together for annual festivals of student theatre, and many are the professional careers that began with a university group at the Edinburgh Festival

Nevertheless, the staff and actors of the majority of professional theatres today gain much of their early experience in academic theatre. Internship programs often help students’ transition from undergraduate or graduate programs into the professional world.

The search for an audience

In Great BritainThroughout the world, government subsidy has and private funds have been applied in varying fashion fashions to attract wider audiences to the theatre. Theatre-in-education companies have been formed to tour schools, with both classical and new or improvised plays. (Although rarer, similar companies can be found in the United States and Canada, such as the Living Stage in Washington, D.C., an offshoot of Arena Stage.) Probably the most significant investment has been in the regional theatres, where the intention has been to provide audiences with not only a wide-ranging repertoire but also the opportunity to develop regional voices. The Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre have also made regional tours a significant part of their planning, but London is still the theatre centre of Britain and the audience remains a minority.

In the former Soviet Union the statistics of popular interest in art and literature were impressive, but the level of creative work was kept low by censorship. Artistic creation was compelled to conform to party policy, and the political machinery often manipulated popular opinion. In the theatre, success was sometimes assured to productions that were politically acceptable, denied to those that were not.

In both the East and the West, tremendous efforts are being made toward more fruitful use of the leisure time that technology has made available. But by the second half of the 20th century, theatre had become a regular leisure-time activity of only a small minority. Although the civilized world generally regarded a serious theatre as an essential activity, deserving of public support, the mere existence of an intelligent and imaginative theatre does not ensure such support. This can probably be achieved only by profound changes of belief concerning the purpose not merely of theatre but of human existence.

Live theatre has troupes, as adjuncts of regional theatres, frequently tour schools and perform classics, children’s plays, or new drama. Many programs also exist to bring young people to the theatre. Regional and international tours are also undertaken by theatres such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Taganka Theatre of Moscow, and countless others. The late 20th century also saw the worldwide development of performing arts festivals modeled on the Avignon Festival in France and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; these provided a venue for a great variety of international performing artists while also boosting local economies through tourism. At the turn of the 21st century, theatre was also being used as a development tool. Funded by international aid agencies in conjunction with local governments, this type of theatre deployed actors as agents provocateurs to identify issues of concern in communities. Performances expressed local communities’ views on the genesis, manifestations, and solutions applicable to that locality. This approach was subsequently adopted in developed countries through programs that partnered theatre artists with underprivileged communities (the homeless, urban youth, the rural poor, the incarcerated, immigrants and refugees, etc.) in an attempt to build solidarity within each community and bring the attention of a broader public to the community’s circumstances.

Throughout the 20th century, live theatre demonstrated an unexpected tenacity in the face of competition from film, television, video, the Internet, and other popular entertainmentsmedia. At one time, theatre lovers feared that a new generation of actors, directors, and technicians without professional experience of the theatre would precipitate a decline in theatrical art; on the contrary, many people actors most identified with movies have taken took large risks to perform on the stage, so that actors such as . These actors, including Dustin Hoffman, Martin Sheen, and Lauren Bacallhave , brought to the theatre precisely those qualities of risk and commitment that make live performance so challenging.

Other factors that contribute to the perpetuation ongoing survival of theatre include the theatrical revival of dramatic classicsthemselves, the classic , which are given new expression to show perennial relevance across time and culture. Revivals of dramas of different epochs and different cultures such as cultures—including Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BCE), Molière’s Tartuffe (1664), Racine’s Phèdre (1677), Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (published 1867), Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923), and Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1939)—the , although the instances could be multiplied countless times without exhausting the great works list of the human spirit. Such classics regularly performed—often reinvigorate these works by reimagining their settings or their characters. The success of these revivals is a reminder that such works were written for the stage and, it is often argued, can be given full expression only by stage representation.

Adaptations for the screen or television of material that was conceived in terms of the stage remain merely adaptations. If the original is a work of genius, the adaptation must seem presumptuously inadequate, in the same sense that a reproduction of Georges Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte on a coffee mug remains merely an adaptation. Although Laurence Olivier’s film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III, or and Othello were justified in justified—in that thousands of people who would not otherwise have had the opportunity saw to see the adapted original plays magnificently performed, those were enabled to see adaptations magnificently performed—those who saw both the stage and the film versions can testify usually testified to the superiority of the theatrical experience. The texts used in the films were necessarily garbled and hashedincomplete, and the acting and direction were adapted to suit a medium for which the originals were not conceived. Some part of the public will always believe that it is as important to see fine performances of theatrical masterworks as it is to see the originals of great achievements in painting, sculpture, and architecture , rather than mere photographic reproductions of such works. As long as this is the case, there is a good reason for the continued existence of a live theatre.

Another reason for believing in the survival of theatre is that the live theatre can achieve a sense of occasionimpossible for canned events. This sense of occasion is a heightening of everyday people and occurrences into a new vividness and significance: not significance—not just the heightening of characters and events of the drama but also a heightening of the people who take part, spectators as much as performers. This can occur more effectively if the occasion is a great one, if the house is large and full, if the audience appears to be distinguished, and if celebrated performers are taking part. But the sense of occasion can be achieved more simply, more subtly, and less expensively. What matters is that, when the performance begins, the audience should be excited, receptive, and ready. Yet the heart of the occasion lies not in the auditorium, however bedizened with celebrity, but on the stage. There a troupe is about to create either a new work or a new interpretation of a classic. The sense of occasion is at its strongest when the cast is distinguished, but even unknown players in obscure performances can create it.

Activity is required of the theatre audience if the performance is to succeed; the audience is required to share with the performer , and to assist him in the act of creation. In films and in television, mistakes can be eliminated, ; unsuccessful scenes can be reshot , even and rewritten, ; and the whole work can be manipulated, edited, titivated, and set before the public with every detail in place. The product has been prefabricated without the cooperation of its audience, which is therefore reduced to the status of a mere consumer. In the theatre, on the other hand, every audience helps to create or to destroy the performance. To some extent, audiences get the performance they deserve.

Moreover, in every live performance is the imminence of disaster. An actor must be skillful and an audience must be imaginative if Macbeth, seeing a phantom dagger in the air, or Othello, falling down in an epileptic seizure, is to be moving and impressive instead of merely ludicrous. Yet it is precisely this hairbreadth division between the sublime and the ridiculous that creates the sense of occasion.

Some dozens of immortally great expressions of the human spirit have been written for performance by live actors for live audiences and cannot be adequately experienced in any other medium. This is why, in spite of despite economic difficulties, in spite of far smaller challenges, limited technical resources and far greater distributive problemsfunding, and the logistical problems of touring, the live theatre must survive.

Few works deal extensively as comprehensively with shifting aspirations for the aesthetics of theatre as a body of knowledge or theory unrelated to particular productions, schools of playwriting, or historical periods. Notable modern exceptions are Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (1958; originally published in French, 1938), which considers theatre in its broadest implications and has had enormous influence on avant-garde theatre since World War II; and Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (1968, reissued 1975), an elucidation of personal artistic values by the director-teacher whose Polish Laboratory Theatre has been among the most controversial and innovative theatres of the century. The ideas of one of the 20th century’s most important playwrights and directors emerge in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett (1964, reissued 1978). A tendentious view of the shaping of 20th-century theatre by an influential director emerges in Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre, translated and edited by Hugh Rorrison (1978; originally published in German, 1929).

Perceptive analyses of aesthetic points of view represented in theatrical production include Mordecai Gorelik, New Theatres for Old (1940, reprinted 1975), a classic work on staging and design that covers the late 19th century and first four decades of the 20th; Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vol. (1932, reprinted 1954), an incisive contemporary view of drama in the 1890s; and the writings of such major 20th-century critics as Harley Granville-Barker, Stark Young, George Jean Nathan, and Kenneth Tynan. Personal histories by leading theoreticians and practitioners, including Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, translated from the Russian (1924, reissued 1980); and Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties (1957, reissued 1983), carry implicit commentaries on the art of theatre. Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares, translated from the Russian (1936, reissued 1980); and Toby Cole (comp.), Acting: A Handbook of the Stanislavski Method, rev. ed. (1955, reprinted 1971), though specialized, develop aesthetic points of view that have underlain much of the theatrical production in the West during the 20th century. A classic study of the aesthetic intentions of theatre is contained in Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theatre (1949, reprinted 1972); while Peter Brook, The Empty Space (1968, reprinted 1981), is a brilliant analysis of theatrical values as manifested in such diverse areas as commercialized drama, the popular, or “rough,” theatre, and the dedicated avant-garde, or “holy,” theatre. A detailed examination of the development of experimental theatre in the 20th century can be found in Christopher Innes, Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde (1981).

An overview—outdated but still singular—of the many different forms and aesthetic conditions of Oriental theatre is contained in Faubion Bowers, Theatre in the East (1956, reprinted 1980). Discussions of the conditions under which theatrical forms have emerged appear in many works, including Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., 12 vol. (1907–15), available also in numerous later editions, both complete and abridged, and those of Margaret Mead and other anthropologists. Finally, such periodicals as Drama Review (quarterly; formerly, Tulane Drama Review), Theatre Arts (1939–64), and Theatre Quarterly (1971–81), contain important reportorial, critical, and philosophical writing on theatre as both an artistic and a social expressionMarvin A. Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present, expanded ed. (1993). Collections of supporting material that serve as good companion texts are Bernard F. Dukore (compiler), Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski (1974); and Richard Drain (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre: A Sourcebook (1995). These are complemented by three surveys of theatre history: Glynne Wickham, A History of the Theatre, 2nd ed. (1992); Margot Berthold, The History of World Theater: From the Beginnings to the Baroque, trans. from German (1991); and Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, trans. from German (1999).

The social function of theatre is addressed by Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (1997); an apt companion to Bennett is Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (2008). Marvin A. Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (2004), surveys a range of late-20th- and 21st-century perspectives on theatre studies. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982), became a point of reference in the 1980s and ’90s for intercultural studies; one such is Richard Schechner, Between Theater & Anthropology (1985).

Relationships of cultural policy to subsidy may be traced in Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (1992); Justin Lewis, Art, Culture, and Enterprise: The Politics of Art and the Cultural Industries (1990); and David L. Looseley, The Politics of Fun: Cultural Policy and Debate in Contemporary France (1995). The historical background to these debates can be traced in William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (1966, reissued 1993); and Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (2000).